Last Updated: November 7, 2024

Guiding buyers of online samples

The ESOMAR questions were established by the European Society for Opinion and Market Research (ESOMAR), which is a world association for market, social, and opinion researchers. It’s designed to provide a standard set of questions a buyer can ask to determine whether a sample provider’s practices and samples fit their research objectives. 

This document contains responses by SurveyMonkey to the ESOMAR questions to help guide your online sample purchase decisions and give you confidence in our sample quality.  These responses are only applicable with regard to our SurveyMonkey Audience panelists.

Table of contents

1. What experience does your company have in providing online samples for market research? How long have you been providing this service? Do you also provide similar services for other uses such as direct marketing? If so, what proportion of your work is for market research?

SurveyMonkey is a global leader in online surveys and forms that empowers people with the insights they need to make decisions with speed and confidence. Our fast, intuitive feedback management platform connects millions of users worldwide with real-time AI-powered insights that drive meaningful decisions. We provide answers to more than 20 million questions every day so that people and organizations can attract new audiences, delight customers, create advocates, and extend their competitive advantage in the marketplace. Our vision is to raise the bar for human experiences by amplifying individual voices. 

Established in 1999, SurveyMonkey was one of the first providers of online survey platforms and thus has decades of experience helping customers make decisions with online surveys and panels. Today, the SurveyMonkey platform is trusted and used by individual users looking for speedy insights, to empowering over 95% of the Fortune 500 and decision makers at over 345,000 organizations worldwide with the business critical insights needed to shape exceptional experiences.

SurveyMonkey Audience, SurveyMonkey's global online panel network, is integrated into the SurveyMonkey platform in addition to purpose-built SurveyMonkey market research solutions. Audience combines proprietary online panel sources as well as partnerships with external panel providers. Proprietary sources include SurveyMonkey Contribute, an online panel, and SurveyMonkey Rewards, a mobile app panel. SurveyMonkey Contribute and Rewards have been in operation in the United States since 2011 and 2018, respectively.

SurveyMonkey does not provide samples for any services outside of market research, as our global panel is solely dedicated to providing the highest quality market insights.  

2. Do you have staff with responsibility for developing and monitoring the performance of the sampling algorithms and related automated functions who also have knowledge and experience in this area? What sort of training in sampling techniques do you provide to your frontline staff?

Yes, SurveyMonkey's product and engineering teams have created sampling algorithms with best sampling practices in mind. They monitor these algorithms and conduct panel calibration studies regularly. Our product and engineering teams are supported by our survey science team that comes with technical backgrounds in political polling, sampling, survey methodology, and market research.

We also have a team of customer success market research experts who have years of experience with hands-on research and can help with research project needs, from fielding to completion. These experts are trained on relevant best practices and techniques via internally created training programs, as well as programs custom-curated for SurveyMonkey. We also offer documentation via the SurveyMonkey Help Center for definitions and product help, specifically tailored for market research. It can be accessed here.

3. What other services do you offer? Do you cover sample-only, or do you offer a broad range of data collection and analysis services?

SurveyMonkey solutions and services span 5 categories: customer feedback, employee feedback, market research, product development, event feedback, and online forms. 

For market research specifically, the SurveyMonkey product & service offerings can be broken down into the following:

Broadly speaking, there are two models of sample sources and recruitment:

Panels

These are databases of potential participants who declare that they will cooperate for future data collection if selected, generally in exchange for a reward/incentive. This includes traditional access panels, co-branded panels, or opt-in databases of individuals who agreed to complete research projects and also undertake other non-market research activities (watch ads, download an app, complete marketing offers, etc, also known as loyalty programs, or rewards communities within GPT (Get paid to) sites.) Loyalty card and subscription databases are included here if there is a continuous relationship with members who understand the commitment asked of them.

Intercepts

This includes intercepts from offer walls, affiliate networks, social media or other platforms to drive traffic to a survey. Intercept is an approach where potential participants are asked to take a survey for a reward while they are engaged in another activity such as playing an online game, reading news, or some other online activity. Intercepted participants may be previously unknown to the sample provider or may have been pre-identified and profiled through a prior survey experience.

4. Using the broad classifications above, from what sources of online sample do you derive participants?

SurveyMonkey derives its participants from its global panel network, SurveyMonkey Audience. SurveyMonkey Audience is made up of two proprietary panels, SurveyMonkey Contribute and SurveyMonkey Rewards, and is augmented by third party global partners. These partners supplement our own respondent supply to fulfill customers’ needs that our internal sources cannot fulfill—mainly samples outside of the United States. 

Our proprietary panels do not source from intercepts, but are instead opt-in panels recruited from SurveyMonkey survey takers and panel app downloads.

5. Which of these sources are proprietary or exclusive and what is the percent share of each in the total sample provided to a buyer?

As mentioned above, our SurveyMonkey Contribute and SurveyMonkey Rewards panels are proprietary and exclusive. We only allow access to our proprietary panels from SurveyMonkey, no other survey platform or market research vendor can leverage our exclusive panels.

The percentage share of each source depends on the audience that a customer targets. As of 2024, for customers that target US respondents, approximately 77.5% of our sample comes from SurveyMonkey Rewards and 11% of our sample comes from SurveyMonkey Contribute. As of 2024, for customers that target international audiences, 100% of respondents are sourced from trusted third party panel partners. However, if customers would like to have a particular panel source, they can work with our customer success team to source from whichever panels they prefer. 

6. What recruitment channels are you using for each of the sources you have described? Is the recruitment process ‘open to all’ or by invitation only? Are you using probabilistic methods? Are you using affiliate networks and referral programs and in what proportions? How does your use of these channels vary by geography?

SurveyMonkey Contribute is our online panel that enables survey respondents to complete surveys in return for charitable donations to the organization of their choice from our approved list of nonprofit organizations. We recruit people to SurveyMonkey Contribute through a variety of means, the primary method of recruitment being SurveyMonkey survey respondents. 

SurveyMonkey Rewards is our iOS and Android mobile app that allows users to earn credits for completing surveys that can be either redeemed as gift card rewards or a donation made to participating charities. We recruit people to SurveyMonkey Rewards through a variety of means, including our app store listings as well as promoting the app to SurveyMonkey survey respondents.

Both of our proprietary panels, Contribute and Rewards, are open to all in the U.S. We do not use probabilistic methods, affiliate networks, or referral programs for panel recruitment.

Our integrated third-party sample partners use a variety of recruitment methods to achieve representative samples in global markets. For US markets, respondents are first sourced from our SurveyMonkey Contribute and SurveyMonkey Rewards panels. Then, we source from our third party panel providers, which help supplement and target international audiences, niche and hard-to-reach markets, like B2B and Healthcare.

7. What form of validation do you use in recruitment to ensure that participants are real, unique, and are who they say they are? 

We maintain a single user ID across our two proprietary panels, verified with email or mobile authentication, and have a “smart” routing technology to ensure that samples from our panels are unblended and valid. We have a number of fraud detection mechanisms on our Rewards panel, including reCaptcha at sign-up and during survey-taking. We validate that IP addresses are within the US, VPNs are not being used, they are using a valid mobile carrier, and are not geohopping. When they go to redeem their reward, we also conduct phone number verification that determines they are using a valid mobile phone with a US-based number. In addition to fraud detection, we also implement an AI-powered model that detects fraudulent behaviors, such as gibberish, nonsense, and profanity. This model assigns panelists a “response quality score”. Panelists who exhibit these behaviors or achieve a poor response quality score are reviewed in real time and flagged. If flagged, we automatically delete the response and the panelist is not paid for their submission to discourage this behavior. In cases where the customer identifies responses that were not flagged by the response quality model, a customer can reach out to Customer Support.  SurveyMonkey will manually review the reported responses and then potentially suspend these accounts. 

When fielding, we ensure each of our panels (proprietary and partner) serve mutually exclusive audience segments (e.g. younger males; older females), so we are able to avoid duplicate respondents for a survey. For example, the router will ensure that we source different age groups and genders of respondents from one unique panel versus a blend. 

8. What brand (domain) and/or app are you using with proprietary sources?

9. Which model(s) do you offer to deliver sample? Managed service, self-serve, or API integration?

We offer a self-serve model where our SurveyMonkey Audience panel is accessible in both our SurveyMonkey platform and our purpose-built research solutions. In this case, customers can run a project from survey creation to fielding to analysis all on their own. 

SurveyMonkey Enterprise customers with sizable projects can work with our internal project managers to define the sample source and cost. They will also have access to research design consultation, language translations and data tables for insights.

Our third party panels supply sample to us for our customers’ projects through API integrations, but our proprietary Contribute and Rewards panels do not provide sample to other survey platforms. 

10. If offering intercepts, or providing access to more than one source, what level of transparency do you offer over the composition of your sample (sample sources, sample providers included in the blend). Do you let buyers control which sources of sample to include in their projects, and if so how? Do you have any integration mechanisms with third-party sources offered?

The only respondent sources we use are our proprietary panels and third-party panel partners. We do not use intercept or river sampling sources.

When using our self-service, DIY interface, the vast majority of US sample comes from our own proprietary sources, and our international sample is sourced via partners. We notify clients for any price changes that may occur when selecting targeting criteria. In order to deliver the most relevant and high-quality respondents for their surveys, buyers aren’t able to select which sources their sample is from.

11. Of the sample sources you have available, how would you describe the suitability of each for different research applications? 

Our main recruitment source for SurveyMonkey Contribute and SurveyMonkey Rewards provides a broad spectrum of panelists across demographic groups and suitable samples for any quantitative market research use case. 

The SurveyMonkey Rewards mobile app provides us with the ability to gain access to mobile panelists who find us through the app stores and/or through our marketing efforts. SurveyMonkey Rewards enables us to source younger demographics that are harder to find on traditional online panels. Rewards is inherently mobile-only, so it is less suitable for testing detail-rich or text-heavy concepts that would be more visible on desktop. 

Due to our expansive network of panel partners, we can offer suitable samples for all the applications mentioned above — product testing (we even have a purpose-built solution for this), and desktop and mobile questionnaires. Currently, we don’t offer online qualitative research on our platform, but we can offer the ability to recruit for such studies if requested. We recommend that our buyers keep their survey length to under 50 questions, but other than that, our panels are well equipped to serve different research applications. 

12. Briefly describe your overall process from invitation to survey completion. What steps do you take to achieve a sample that “looks like” the target population? What demographic quota controls, if any, do you recommend?

Survey invitations ask respondents to provide their valuable opinions to help companies make better decisions. Invitations can be sent via email, text, or push notifications. There are clear instructions within the invitation to start the survey, which links directly to the first page of instructions or questions in the survey online. 

Panelists can also log into their SurveyMonkey Contribute account or into the SurveyMonkey Rewards app directly to start taking surveys. We have limits in place to control the number of surveys any given panelist can take in one day/session. Once a participant is in the survey, they answer its questions and submit the survey once they’ve reached the end. We consider a response complete when all questions marked as required (mandatory) have been answered and the survey is submitted. Responses from panelists who answer screening questions but end up not qualifying for the survey do not count as completed responses.

If the survey has already closed by the time the panelist clicks the link in the invitation, the panelist is directed to our router that will find an open eligible survey for the panelist to take. Panelists receive no more than one invitation every 6-12 hours if they opted into receiving emails or mobile app push notifications.

Our proprietary panels are composed of a diverse group of people and are reflective of the US population. When customers use our Audience panel to purchase a sample, they’re able to select their targeting criteria (e.g., gender, age, income, location). By default, we balance on 4 buckets of age and gender, sample size permitting. Customers can also choose to balance age and gender based on the most recent US census breakdown, or even select their own age and gender distributions. 

Custom balancing options are also available for age and gender for international samples provided by our third-party sample partners. Customers are able to choose demographic targeting requirements such as household income, and ethnicity with our partner panels as well. 

13. What profiling information do you hold on at least 80% of your panel members plus any intercepts known to you through prior contact? How does this differ by the sources you offer? How often is each of those data points updated? Can you supply these data points as appends to the data set? Do you collect this profiling information directly or is it supplied by a third party?

We ask SurveyMonkey Contribute panelists the same four standard profiling questions when they sign up: age, gender, US zip code, and household income range. We ask our SurveyMonkey Rewards panelists an additional 6 profiling questions: ethnicity, marital status, employment status, number of children, education level, and job industry. Our panelists are also invited to answer profile surveys that contain 14 questions at a time including questions pertaining to: employment, marital status, political affiliation, and internet usage, to name a few. We have access to over 75 profiled attributes through this method that allow our customers to reach a targeted audience.

Some questions, like shopping habits, are asked every six months of our SurveyMonkey Contribute panelists to keep the information up-to-date. A more comprehensive list of profiled attributes by country can be found in our help center.

For our third party panel providers, we access panelist profiling data through the panel providers’ public APIs. We do not, however, store this data in our platform.

When targeting based on our pre-profiled attributes isn’t sufficient, we also enable customers to include custom screening questions in their survey. In this case, an estimated incidence rate range is provided at checkout to inform the number of invitations that need to be sent to reach the desired number of survey completions.

We do not supply profiling data in customer datasets other than basic profiling information (age, gender, region, income), or data from questions asked explicitly within the customer’s survey itself. 

14. What information do you need about a project in order to provide an estimate of feasibility? What, if anything, do you do to give upper or lower boundaries around these estimates?

The SurveyMonkey Audience panel automatically calculates feasibility and estimated completion date based on:

15. What do you do if the project proves impossible for you to complete in field? Do you inform the sample buyer as to who you would use to complete the project? In such circumstances, how do you maintain and certify third party sources/sub-contractors?

We utilize our third-party sample partners when we’re unable to find enough respondents from our proprietary panels or enough respondents from countries where we don’t currently have an internal panel. We evaluate partners based on several items, including:

In our self-serve interface, we do not inform the sample buyer in advance when using third party panels, but we do notify them if there are any price changes from third party samples. 

Continued evaluation of third-party partners include the following:

16. Do you employ a survey router or any yield management techniques? If yes, please describe how you go about allocating participants to surveys. How are potential participants asked to participate in a study? Please specify how this is done for each of the sources you offer.

Yes, our SurveyMonkey Contribute and SurveyMonkey Rewards panels as well as our fully integrated panel partners use our own proprietary routing system.

Panelists can enter our router via email invitations, push notifications, or by logging into the panel directly. When a panelist enters our router, the router first looks for eligible open surveys based on the panelists’ profiled demographics. Then, the router randomly assigns the panelist to an eligible survey. If a customer has purchased Express Delivery, their survey goes to the top of the open survey list. Panelists whose demographics meet the need of a high-priority survey are assigned Express Delivery surveys first.

When a survey has enough respondents of a particular demographic (based on the targeting and balancing options selected by the customer), additional respondents matching that demographic aren’t able to enter the survey via the router. We also have default exclusion rules in place to make sure a panelist doesn’t take the same survey more than once in a 100-day period. These exclusion rules can be custom-configured for select customers working with our customer success team. In addition to these guards, we also perform routine panel calibration studies in partnership with the SurveyMonkey

research team to measure and improve our panels’ response quality.

17. Do you set limits on the amount of time a participant can be in the router before they qualify for a survey?

When a participant enters our router, they either instantaneously qualify for a survey or are informed that no survey is available for them. This process takes seconds, as our router can provide this feedback immediately. Participants are not asked screening questions when they enter a router. 

Due to this immediate qualification process, we don’t have a time limit. However, our router limits Rewards panelists to make no more than 4 requests per hour to take a survey, and Contribute users can take no more than 10 surveys every 24 hours.   

18. What information about a project is given to potential participants before they choose whether to take the survey or not? How does this differ by the sources you offer? 

SurveyMonkey Rewards panelists  receive an estimated amount of time the survey will take as well as the reward they will receive upon completion of the survey. Information about the specific study is optionally provided by the survey creator on the first page of the survey. 

In exchange for providing their time and opinions, we provide members of SurveyMonkey Contribute with two non-cash compensation options and members of SurveyMonkey Rewards with either gift card choices (such as Amazon.com Gift Cards) or a non-cash reward of donating to a non-profit. We make this information available to participants before they choose to take a survey. 

For SurveyMonkey Contribute, each survey respondent who finishes a survey receives:

For SurveyMonkey Rewards, each respondent who finishes a survey receives:

Our third-party sample partners incentivize respondents in a variety of ways depending on the market and method of recruitment.

19. Do you allow participants to choose a survey from a selection of available surveys? If so, what are they told about each survey that helps them to make that choice?

Participants are automatically matched to the most suitable survey in the router based on their profiled demographics, as mentioned above. They do not choose from a selection of available surveys.

20. What ability do you have to increase (or decrease) incentives being offered to potential participants (or sub-groups of participants) during the course of a survey? If so, can this be flagged at the participant level in the dataset?

We do not increase or decrease incentives offered to potential participants during a survey. Each respondent from the same panel gets the same reward for completing a survey. The exception to this is when a poor quality response is detected, in which case, no reward is provided. Panelists that are disqualified from the survey receive $0.10 as opposed to the full reward amount. 

21. Do you measure participant satisfaction at the individual project level? If so, can you provide normative data for similar projects (by length, by type, by subject, by target group)? 

Yes, we do measure participant satisfaction based on the project. The most important measure we use to gauge satisfaction is the start-to-complete rate of every survey. If this rate falls below an acceptable threshold, our platform launches a manual review with our support team to help ensure the survey design is high quality and there are no issues with the survey taking experience. Our support team will remedy these issues at no cost after consulting with customers.

We also measure new respondent registrations, daily and weekly engagement rates with our apps, the number of surveys taken over a given period, and user churn rates. This information is not readily available to our clients. 

22. Do you provide a debrief report about a project after it has completed? If yes, can you provide an example?

Results and demographic data are available in real time as soon as a project launches. Customers can analyze their data at any time during the project while additional responses continue to be submitted until they are notified by our systems that the project has closed.

A debrief report is available after a project has been completed, and includes the following project data:

For every project launched, regardless of the targeting criteria applied to a targeted audience, we automatically provide demographic information about the respondents’ gender, age range, and device used to take the survey. For projects fielded by either SurveyMonkey Contribute or SurveyMonkey Rewards panels, we also provide household income range and region. Customers can gather additional demographic data for advanced targeting criteria used, or by asking respondents directly as questions in their survey. Customers can export data using our Analyze feature and have great presentation-ready formats with modern graphics and user-friendly layouts in any of the following formats: PPT, PDF, XLSX, CSV, SPSS.

23. How often can the same individual participate in a survey? How does this vary across your sample sources? What is the mean and maximum amount of time a person may have already been taking surveys before they entered this survey? How do you manage this?

A panelist can only complete the same survey once in a 100-day period, as our proprietary panels have built-in 100-day exclusions by default. For some of our partner panels, respondents can be excluded for dynamic periods of time. 

We do not have a maximum amount of time for survey taking, however, we do have a maximum amount of surveys that users can take each day to decrease fraudulent behavior.

For our Rewards panel:

For our Contribute panel:

Both of our proprietary panels use the same account/userID info to prevent duplication across panels. If a given panelist has completed one survey for a specific customer or time range, they can't complete another survey for that customer and/or for the defined period of time. 

24. What data do you maintain on individual participants such as recent participation history, date(s) of entry, source/channel, etc? Are you able to supply buyers with a project analysis of such individual level data? Are you able to append such data points to your participant records?

We maintain device metadata (like IP address, device type, and operating system), start and completion times for survey responses, and last survey taken date for Audience panelists. 

We don't provide reports with individual level data outside of the information available in a survey’s XLS or CSV exports. Upon request, we can provide readouts of these exports to our clients.

We do not permit our customers to ask for personally identifying information (PII) within any surveys, as this information is explicitly against our Terms of Service, and customers are not allowed to field their surveys with these questions included. The only exceptions to this are 1) certain data collected through our partner panel providers, and 2) recontact studies where email addresses are collected for a follow up call or survey.  These exceptions are subject to additional contractual terms and an internal policy, and the surveys will be reviewed and approved by our team before deploying.

25. Please describe your procedures for confirmation of participant identity at the project level. Please describe these procedures as they are implemented at the point of entry to a survey or router. 

SurveyMonkey has a range of features to deal with professional and/or duplicate respondents. We only allow one SurveyMonkey Contribute or SurveyMonkey Rewards account per email address and one SurveyMonkey Rewards account per US cell phone number. For our Contribute panel, email verification is requested upon registration, and for our Rewards panel, phone verification is required when a Rewards member attempts to redeem a reward. 

In order to enter our router and begin a survey, the panelist must be logged into their account. Apart from the checks on signup and login and initial survey screening in the questionnaire, there are no additional checks when entering a survey. Customers may choose to include trap questions in their survey with disqualification logic in order to further confirm identity at the project level.

We also have procedures in place to prevent bot traffic, such as reCaptcha, and use machine learning to flag and automatically delete low-quality responses. For customer-filed support cases, we delete any invalid and/or poor quality responses and replenish them as well. If we’ve detected respondents who have taken too many surveys, we’ll look at their IP address and limit the number of responses coming from an IP address within an hour-long time frame. We also detect multiple attempts to take a survey from the same IP address, and block the account to prevent the same user taking the same survey from multiple browsers or phones.

26. How do you manage source consistency and blend at the project level? With regard to trackers, how do you ensure that the nature and composition of sample sources remain the same over time? Do you have reports on blends and sources that can be provided to buyers? Can source be appended to the participant data records? 

We blend sources when needed to deliver the optimal sample for SurveyMonkey Audience panel buyers to meet their demographic mix targeting requirements. As mentioned before, US-based samples are first and primarily sourced from our proprietary panels, SurveyMonkey Contribute and SurveyMonkey Rewards. Then, third party panels supplement any other sample needed. For self-serve projects whose customers purchase two projects with the same survey, we have procedures in place to ensure that the sources used are the same.

We can provide reports of blends and sources to buyers upon request. Source is not automatically appended to the participant data records, but can be requested.

In addition to consistency of sample source, balancing on specific quotas, and ensuring consistent fielding times, we are also able to provide weighting analysis post-fielding.

27. Please describe your participant/member quality tracking, along with any health metrics you maintain on members/participants, and how those metrics are used to invite, track, quarantine, and block people from entering the platform, router, or a survey. What processes do you have in place to compare profiled and known data to in-survey responses?

SurveyMonkey employs several unique approaches to combat undesired within-survey behavior that results in poor data quality. We perform both periodic quality check surveys and panel calibration studies that help ensure open-ended response quality and assess poor respondent behavior.

More specifically, we implement a machine learning / AI-generated “reputation score” for our respondents. This reputation score considers a respondent’s answers to previous survey questions and then provides a quality score for open-ended responses. When issues arise, SurveyMonkey employees look at these quality scores in manual review processes, and suspend accounts who fall below quality thresholds. Alerts are sent to accounts that exhibit borderline poor quality.

Customers also receive information about survey completion time for each respondent. On top of that, we have a product specialist team available to help customers with any data quality issues they experience. 

28. For work where you program, host, and deliver the survey data, what processes do you have in place to reduce or eliminate undesired in-survey behaviours, such as (a) random responding, (b) Illogical or inconsistent responding, (c) overuse of item nonresponse (e.g., “Don’t Know”) (d) inaccurate or inconsistent responding, (e) incomplete responding, or (f) too rapid survey completion? 

There are several approaches we use to reduce undesired in-survey behaviors for all panel participants:

29. Please provide the link to your participant privacy notice (sometimes referred to as a privacy policy) as well as a summary of the key concepts it addresses.

A service-specific privacy notice is made available to our Rewards and Contribute panelists on account creation, panelist invites, and listed within our main SurveyMonkey Privacy Notice provided on the company website in our Legal Terms and Policy Center. Our Main Privacy Notice also contains a section to address panelists from our third-party partners who take surveys on our platform (see here). Our policies are segmented into two sections as applicable: one for survey creators and one for survey respondents. They cover what information is collected, how we use the information we collect, with whom we disclose this information, and users’ data rights.

30. How do you comply with key data protection laws and regulations that apply in the various jurisdictions in which you operate? How do you address requirements regarding consent or other legal bases for the processing personal data? How do you address requirements for data breach response, cross-border transfer, and data retention? Have you appointed a data protection officer?

We take privacy and data protection seriously. We provide detailed Terms of Use and privacy notices available for our U.S. proprietary panels at:  

At SurveyMonkey, we aren’t just complying with GDPR, we’re committed to protecting the privacy of individuals, including our customers. Learn more about SurveyMonkey’s GDPR-compliant features. While we use GDPR as our high-water mark for protection of personal data, our privacy program is also shaped by the privacy laws in other jurisdictions in which we operate - including PIPEDA in Canada, HIPAA in the United States, CCPA/CPRA in California, and other US state and sectoral privacy laws.

The instances in which we rely on consent to collect and process personal data are detailed in our global Privacy Notice.

We notify all affected parties of any security incident without undue delay, in accordance with our incident response policy, contractual commitments, and applicable legal requirements. See for example section 7.2 of SurveyMonkey's Data Processing Agreement for our customers.

For more information on our retention policies, please see this help article.

For more information about international transfer, please see this help article.

Details about SurveyMonkey's security practices are available in our Security Statement. We’re committed to handling personal information and data with integrity and care. However, regardless of the security protections and precautions we undertake, there’s always a risk that personal data may be viewed and used by unauthorized third parties as a result of collecting and transmitting your data through the internet.

Other security measures in place include:

We have appointed a data protection officer and they can be reached at dpo@surveymonkey.com.

31. How can participants provide, manage and revise consent for the processing of their personal data? What support channels do you provide for participants?

Participants are able to provide consent by voluntarily taking surveys for our Audience panel after registration. At the time of panel recruitment, panelists are made aware of the purpose of signing up on the panel (i.e. to take part in market research) and create a profile. On SurveyMonkey Contribute, the only profile questions where responses are required are email address, age, gender, ZIP code, and household income range. On SurveyMonkey Rewards, we additionally require panelists to answer questions on ethnicity, marital status, employment status, number of children, education level, and job industry. All other profile responses are optional. Additionally, panelists can edit their profile or delete their account with us at any time.

Upon panel account creation, panelists are provided with our relevant governing terms and privacy notices for their review and consent. When invitations are sent out to panelists, they’re notified of the confidential nature of their responses and given the opportunity to ‘opt out’ of the panel. Each time a survey is sent to a panelist the survey itself is optional. 

32. How do you track and comply with other applicable laws and regulations, such as those that might impact the incentives paid to participants?

We comply with laws applicable to the provision of our services. Our Legal and Corporate Affairs team monitors laws and regulations applicable to our services, including our Audience product, through legal publications and associations, as well as obtaining external legal advice, as necessary.  

33. What is your approach to collecting and processing the personal data of children and young people? Do you adhere to standards and guidelines provided by ESOMAR or GRBN member associations? How do you comply with applicable data protection laws and regulations?

SurveyMonkey only allows participation in our proprietary panel from adults age 18+.

34. Do you implement “data protection by design”(sometimes referred to as “privacy by design”) in your systems and processes? If so, please describe how.

We do implement data protection by design:

Data protection is also built into our systems and processes:

35. What are the key elements of your information security compliance program? Please specify the framework(s) or auditing procedure(s) you comply with or certify to. Does your program include an asset-based risk assessment and internal audit process?

SurveyMonkey has implemented an information security management system using ISO 27001. SurveyMonkey's managed hosting and cloud services providers are certified to ISO 27001 and have obtained SOC 2 Type II audit reports.

36. Do you certify to or comply with a quality framework such as ISO 20252?

SurveyMonkey does not currently have ISO 20252 certification but does follow the quality guidelines outlined under the previous sections above. Our primary research partners comply with ISO 20252 and have implemented an ISO 20252 compliance research management system.

37. Which of the following are you able to provide to buyers, in aggregate and by country and source? 

We are able to provide the following reports upon request, with a 1-2 week notice: